How to help: You can also donate to "Help Kayla and Her Family Fight Cancer" at fundrazr.com

The haunted house will go on.

Boulder resident Von Bortz already had been planning a big-scale haunted house when he met Mike Armstrong early this summer. Armstrong, of Lafayette, was remodeling Bortz's mother's house in Niwot. Armstrong, who possessed construction talent that could bring Bortz's wild ideas to life, was the perfect piece to the puzzle.

They would call it the Four Mile Scare Home Haunt, a free, professional-grade haunted house open to the public, at Bortz's north Boulder residence. Hopefully, they could make it an annual tradition.

It helped that Armstrong also was a Halloween fanatic.

Many families have Thanksgiving traditions or Christmas rituals. The Armstrong family has Halloween traditions.

Each Oct. 1, they wheel a massive costume rack into the living room to play with throughout the month. Their dining room table is covered in 50 tombstones that they decorate together. And every year, the children go trick-or-treating with their cousins and then gather to do a great candy swap, so everyone gets their favorites, says Kayla Armstrong, 15.

This year, Halloween has an even greater significance for the Armstrongs.

On Aug. 19, Mike and his wife came home after celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary to find Kayla asleep -- at 9 p.

Building the Four Mile Scare Home Haunt on behalf of daughter Kayla has been a labor of love for Mike Armstrong.
(Mark Leffingwell/Daily Camera)

m. with all the lights on. When they woke her up, she didn't know where she was or whether it was day or night.

That led to a trip to the emergency room, where an MRI revealed Kayla had a massive brain tumor.

She had beaten a cancerous brain tumor once before, at age 9. Then she spent more than 300 days in the hospital, enduring heavy-duty chemo and radiation, six near-death treatments, a coma, liver failure, an appendix infection, a bone-marrow transplant, short-term memory problems -- needless to say, Kayla is a tough kid.

But she beat it. And without a single complaint, her dad says.

"She has the best attitude ever," Armstrong says. "Her thing is attitude; you're in charge of how you feel about it, and she still has that attitude."

This time, doctors expect Kayla's battle to be even more difficult.

But following Kayla's optimism, the family has vowed to not let the cancer change their party plans. They turned the haunted house into a fundraiser for Kayla.

The haunted house also has turned into a welcome distraction for the Armstrongs -- something to look forward to. As they sit around the dining room table decorating gravestones, they can talk in a low-stress, creative environment, Armstrong says.

"Suddenly our whole family is down there talking about stuff -- good, bad or indifferent, always under the guise that we're making this haunted house for free," he says. "This haunted house has been a huge help to the quality of her life.

The public will be treated to an oversized bat with fangs bared at the Four Mile Scare Home Haunt on Oct. 31.
(Mark Leffingwell/Daily Camera)

She's not sitting at home in bed staring at the ceiling. She wants to be out doing stuff."

In fact, Kayla says she plans to dress up like a zombie and walk around the haunted house on Halloween.

"I don't have a huge amount of energy, but right now I'm there, making sure it all looks good," Kayla says at the haunted house site earlier this month. Then, she says with a laugh, "I will just walk around the whole place as a zombie; it'll work out. I'll just walk my normal speed and it'll be like a zombie."

That kind of attitude is typical for Kayla, Bortz says.

"We've been upping our effort to make this the best Halloween for her that we possibly can," Bortz says. "We've stepped it up big time."

Armstrong says he expects at least 300 people, if not more than 1,000, to attend Four Mile Scare Home Haunt. They just built a 20-foot-tall mausoleum and a 16-foot "squeeze room" that plays on people's fear of tight spaces as they try to squeeze through it. There's also a dollhouse room, a skeleton maze and plenty of creepy actors and "startle props."

It's surprising, what this haunted house has become, Armstrong says. When friends hear the news about Kayla, it's easy to transition the conversation to something positive instead of dwelling on the unknown, he says.

"These real heavy conversations end on this high, positive note. Yes, it's terrible, but we're not just rolling over on ourselves," Armstrong says. "We're going to do something and we're going to do something big."

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